Dell technology reduces Maricopa County’s time spent on administrative tasks by 30 percent and enabled a migration with zero downtime

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Arizona’s Maricopa County, the fourth most populous county in the United States and home to Phoenix, is cost efficiently delivering award-winning services and instant information to its citizens, thanks in part to its upgraded data center based on Dell infrastructure technologies. By migrating to Dell storage and servers from EMC, the county’s Recorder’s Office has been able to speed up implementation of multiple programs that empower citizens while also saving more than half a million dollars for tax payers.

The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions to better serve its constituents. To further boost productivity and provide new capabilities to the community, the country’s IT team wanted to simplify data management, store and serve data faster, and optimize IT resources while maximizing availability of the data center. The office migrated to Dell Compellent arrays powered by Dell PowerEdge servers to quickly achieving service level goals.

As an example of the power of the new infrastructure, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has leveraged its new infrastructure to enable citizens to search more than 150 million documents dating back to 1975. The Optical Character Recognition technology used for the searches runs 40 percent faster on Dell technology, providing citizens with faster access to the content they want. On a daily basis, the site receives more than three million hits and 60,000 documents are purchased. The county was also able to more quickly execute redistricting efforts because Dell’s solutions cut processing time by 75 percent. Further, to help ensure voter confidence, the Recorder’s Office leverages the Dell Compellent array to store real-time GPS data on all voting equipment used across its 724 precincts. The county was the first in the state to implement this type of GPS-enabled tracking system.

The migration to Dell Compellent required no downtime due to the modular nature of array and the IT team can add more drives and new controllers without ripping out and replacing storage systems as it had to in the past. The Dell Compellent storage arrays also include perpetual software licensing, so the county pays only once for software and does not have to re-license software in an upgrade. As a result, the Recorder’s Office estimates its migration to Dell’s systems saved $290,000 in projected upgrade cost avoidance from licensing savings, $135,000 in drive space saved through thin provisioning and $90,000 worth of additional drive space reclaimed due to automated storage tiering.

“I can provision storage for a server in 30 percent less time with Dell Compellent,” says Rich Adams, IT operations manager at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. “Overall, I spend about 30 percent less time on storage administration, giving me more time for other, more valuable projects.”

Additionally, recording each of the 10,000 daily documents processed by the Recorder’s Office has traditionally been a time-consuming process simply because of the geographical size of the county. Giving its constituents more convenient access and enabling recordings in a matter of minutes, the office’s IT team established remote kiosks in local libraries that include a document scanner, webcam, credit card reader and network connection to the Recorder’s Office. The county estimates that more than 200,000 driving miles have been saved to date because constituents no longer have to travel to the office to file documents in person.

“When we’ve proposed ideas like the kiosk, which won a National Association of Counties best-in-category award for innovation, Dell has always been there,” says Terry Thompson, IT director, Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. “Dell helped us with the kiosk design, manufacturing and implementation resources. EMC wouldn’t support the storage tiering we required unless an administrator spent time moving data around.”

“More and more organizations are replacing traditional storage equipment and modernizing their data centers to manage growing amounts of data more efficiently in more flexible and cost-effective ways,” said Travis Vigil, executive director of product management, Dell Storage. “The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office is a standout example of leveraging Dell technology to achieve significant cost savings that enable them to deliver public services easier, faster and with the ability to simply scale as needed.”

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